A Revolution in the Arts – All-Art.org

Early Russian Avant-garde Movements

During the first two decades of the 20th century. Cubism and Futurism were adopted and developed by Russian artists who. except for those living outside Russia, had not previously been involved in the European avant-garde movements. From 1905 until the outbreak of World War I and, subsequently, from the time of the October Revolution until the mid-1920s, three important initiatives were launched in succession: Rayonism, Suprematism, and Constructivism. Founded on intellectual discipline and geometry, these modes entailed original theoretical and pictorial developments, along the lines of Abstractionism. Although aware of its legacy in painting and literature, young Russian artists felt burdened by the cultural tradition of realism and rejected it in favour of the new developments in France. They were mesmerized by the collections of Post-Impressionist works by Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, which were brought to Russia by wealthy merchants such as Shchukin and Morozov. who allowed public viewings.

Russian artists also admired Italian Futurism, avidly reading translations of the manifestos and attending Marinetti's lectures, held in Moscow from 1910 onwards. The Golden Fleece exhibitions of 1908 and 1909 included works by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov (1882-1964) that recalled national tradition in robust primitivist scenes. In 1912. however, work presented at the so-called "Donkey's Tail" exhibition showed that these two artists had already started to embark upon a modernization of Russian painting. Although independent and critical of Western culture, these painters set great store by the Cubo-Futurists' experiments in the use of colour, dynamism of line, and the liberation of art from naturalistic representation.

In his "Manifesto of Rayonism" (published in April 1912 and revised in 1913 for the Target exhibition in Moscow), Larionov defined his new artistic theories as "a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism". Rayonism is said to have drawn its inspiration and name from the scientific discoveries of radioactivity and ultraviolet rays, which revealed the sum of rays derived from an object and the dynamic and simultaneous transmission of light. The movement was promoted in Western Europe throughout 1913 and 1914, and was taken up zealously in Rome during 1917, but failed to survive the upheavals of war. Its main protagonist, Larionov, moved to France to concentrate on stage designs for the Ballets Russes.

The works shown by Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) at "0.10. The Last Futurist Exhibition", held in St Petersburg in 1915, represented an important move towards nonrepresentational art. He had sought to "liberate art from the dead-weight of objectivity" in 1913 by painting a single black square on a white ground, the sole content of which was "the sensitivity of nonobjectivity". The aim of this new movement, which Malevich named Suprematism, was to express the absolute supremacy of sensitivity in the creative arts. The goals of his manifesto, produced in collaboration with the poet Maiakovsky, were to liberate painting from the shackles of naturalistic or symbolic references; to divest it of any practical purpose; and to ensure that it existed only as pure aesthetic sensibility. This involved the composition of elementary geometric shapes, usually squares, which were initially painted black, but were later produced in several colours. The quest for purity and immateriality of form reached its logical conclusion in 1918 with a white square on a white ground. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) exhibited at the St Petersburg shows held in 1915 and was a pupil of Larionov. His work evolved from the Neo-Primitive style towards more abstract compositions. His stormy friendship with Malevich ended when theoretical disagreements arose between them in 1917. Malevich continued to reject any connection between the "pure plastic sensibility' of art and the problems of practical life, whereas the Constructivists, led by Tatlin, held that art had to abandon individual aesthetic stances if it was to help emancipate modern society.

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Rayonism [ Rus. Luchizm].

Term derived from the word for ray (Rus. luch), used to refer to an abstract style of painting developed by the Russian artist Mikhail Larionov. Larionov himself claimed that he had painted his first Rayist work in 1909, but modern scholarship has shown his first Rayist works to date from the latter half of 1912. These included Glass: Rayist Method (New York, Guggenheim) and Rayist Sausage and Mackerel (Cologne, Mus. Ludwig). In 1913 Larionov began to expound and elaborate his theory in a series of manifestos.

Rayonism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Russian Luchism (Rayism) Russian art movement founded by Mikhail F. Larionov, representing one of the first steps toward the development of abstract art in Russia. Larionov exhibited one of the first Rayonist works, Glass, in 1912 and wrote the movement's manifesto that same year (though it was not published until 1913). Explaining the new style, which was a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, Larionov said that it is concerned with spatial forms which areobtained through the crossing of reflected rays from various objects.

The raylike lines appearing in the works of Larionov and Natalya Goncharova bear strong similarities to the lines of force in Futurist paintings. Rayonism apparently ended after 1914, when Larionov and Goncharova departed for Paris.

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Russian Avant-garde Movements

After the Bolshevik revolution and World War I, a new-artistic trend emerged in Europe. Unlike Dadaism's nihilistic stance, the aesthetic individualism of Suprematism, or Mondrian's abstract mysticism, which rejected all political and social value for art, this new movement stressed the need for artists to become actively involved in reshaping society. It declared that the combined forces of art, craftsmanship, and industry could help build a better world. In post-Tsarist Russia, the first Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, was broadly sympathetic towards modern artistic movements, and permitted avant-garde artists to play a role in cultural activity and teaching. Considered useful to society, art was expected to concentrate on architecture, the design of manifestos and household objects, and printing. Known as Constructivism, this movement sought to put these revolutionary aims and ideals into practice. It rejected any creativity that did not have a purpose and categorized it as a specific, purely aesthetic activity. From 1915 to 1916, Tatlin (1885-1953) and Rodchenko (1891-1956) made utensils and household objects in iron, glass, and other industrial materials. They were joined by two brothers. Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977). and the Mayakovsky group, organized by LEV (the Left Front) whose manifesto was published in 1923.

After the first flush of shared enthusiasm among the artists, differences soon emerged over methods and results. Following the subsequent schism in the Constructivist group, Pevsner and Gabo espoused the virtues of realism, which, as expounded in their "Realistic Manifesto" of 1920, supported the absolute value of art and its independence from the structure of society, be it capitalist or communist. Immediately, Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova delivered their riposte in the "Programme of the Productivist Group", airing extreme utilitarian and "functional" views and ending with the exhortation: "Down with art! Up with technology! Down with tradition! Up with Constructivist technical progress!" The art produced by Moscow artists who had emigrated, many of them before World War I, was much more in tune with international movements. Artists such as Larionov, Sonia Delaunay, Goncharova, Chagall, and Soutine settled in Paris, where they found the artistic climate more congenial than in their native country.

_____________ Cubo-Futurism

Alexander Rodchenko Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moscow, 1924

Cubo-Futurism

Term first used in 1913 in a lecture, later published, by the Russian art critic Korney Chukovsky (18821969) in reference to a group of Russian avant-garde poets whose work was seen to relate to French Cubism and Italian Futurism; it was subsequently adopted by painters and is now used by art historians to refer to Russian art works of the period 191215 that combine aspects of both styles. Initially the term was applied to the work of the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksey Kruchonykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshits (18861939) and Vasily Kamensky (18641961), who were grouped around the painter David Burlyuk. Their raucous poetry recitals, public clowning, painted faces and ridiculous clothes emulated the activities of the Italians and earned them the name of Russian Futurists. In poetic output, however, only Mayakovsky could be compared with the Italians; his poem Along the Echoes of the City, for example, which describes various street noises, is reminiscent of Luigi Russolos manifesto Larte dei rumori (Milan, 1913).

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Vladimir Mayakovsky

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born July 7 [July 19, New Style], 1893, Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire died April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period.

At the age of 15 Mayakovsky joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the MoscowArt School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifesto, Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Faceof Public Taste), and Mayakovsky's poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913. Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky completed two majorpoems, Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers) and Fleytapozvonochnik (written 1915, published 1916; The Backbone Flute). Both record a tragedy of unrequited love and express the author's discontent with the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky sought to depoetize poetry, adopting the language of the streets and using daring technical innovations. Above all, his poetry is declamatory, for mass audiences. When the Russian Revolution broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as Oda revolutsi (1918; Ode to Revolution) and Levy marsh (1919; Left March) became very popular. So too did his Misteriya buff (first performed 1921; Mystery Bouffe), a drama representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the Unclean (the proletarians) over the Clean (the bourgeoisie). As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in the Russian Telegraph Agency as a painter of posters and cartoons, which he provided with apt rhymes and slogans. He poured out topical poems of propaganda and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, recording his impressions in poems and in a booklet of caustic sketches, Moye otkrytiye Ameriki (1926; My Discovery of America). He also found time to write scripts for motion pictures, in some of which he acted. In his last three years he completed two satirical plays: Klop (performed 1929; The Bedbug), lampooning the type of philistine that emerged with the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and Banya (performed in Leningrad on January 30, 1930; The Bathhouse), a satire of bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism under Joseph Stalin. Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love, which burst out again and again because of repeated romantic frustrations. After his early lyrics this need came out particularly strongly in two poems, Lyublyu(1922; I Love) and Pro eto (1923; About This). To makethings worse, during a stay in Paris in 1928, he fell in love with a refugee, Tatyana Yakovleva, whom he wanted to marry but who refused him. At the same time, he had misunderstandings with the dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and with Soviet authorities. Nor was the production of his Banya a success. Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow.

Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene, but much of his utilitarian and topical poetry is now out of date. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations, however, influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his impress has been strong, especially in the 1930s, after Stalin declared him the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.

Alexander Rodchenko Photomontage for rear cover of Mayakovsky's "Razgovor c fininspektorom o poezii" ("A Conversation with a Tax-collector about Poetry"), 1926.

_____________ Constructivism

Founded in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian Constructivist movement developed from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Suprematism in Russia, Neo Plasticism in Holland, and the Bauhaus School in Germany. The term Constructivism is used to define non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics, and painting. As a response to changes in technology and contemporary life, it advocated a change in the art scene, aiming to create a new order in art and architecture that referenced social and economic problems. Brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner also supported the movement, infusing sculptural elements from cubism and futurism with an allusion to architecture, machinery, and technology. The movements first Constructivist manifesto was written in 1921 when the First Working Group of Constructivists was formed in Moscow. The movement later spread to Holland and Germany before gaining international popularity. The style was initially supported by the Soviet Regime, but later was deemed unsuitable for mass propaganda reasons. Following this decree, Gabo and Pevsner went into exile while Tatlin, Popova and El Lissitzky stayed in Russia. The Constructivist movement was also prominent in theatrical scene design, mostly spread by the efforts of Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Constructivism

Avant-garde tendency in 20th-century painting, sculpture, photography, design and architecture, with associated developments in literature, theatre and film. The term was first coined by artists in Russia in early 1921 and achieved wide international currency in the 1920s. Russian Constructivism refers specifically to a group of artists who sought to move beyond the autonomous art object, extending the formal language of abstract art into practical design work. This development was prompted by the Utopian climate following the October Revolution of 1917, which led artists to seek to create a new visual environment, embodying the social needs and values of the new Communist order. The concept of International Constructivism defines a broader current in Western art, most vital from around 1922 until the end of the 1920s, that was centred primarily in Germany. International Constructivists were inspired by the Russian example, both artistically and politically. They continued, however, to work in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, while also experimenting with film and photography and recognizing the potential of the new formal language for utilitarian design. The term Constructivism has frequently been used since the 1920s, in a looser fashion, to evoke a continuing tradition of geometric abstract art that is constructed from autonomous visual elements such as lines and planes, and characterized by such qualities as precision, impersonality, a clear formal order, simplicity and economy of organization and the use of contemporary materials such as plastic and metal.

Constructivism (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the painting reliefsabstract geometric constructionsof Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was to construct art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers.

Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and laterin the 1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States. Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian Lszl Moholy-Nagy, who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because of Naziinterference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy disseminated Constructivist principles.

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Antoine Pevsner

(b Oryol, 18 Jan 1886; d Paris, 12 April 1962).

French painter and sculptor of Russian birth. Son of an industrialist and brother of the sculptor NAUM GABO, he grew up in Bryansk. He studied at the School of Art in Kiev (19029), where according to Gabo he first met Alexander Archipenko, and then spent a three-month probationary period at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Among his early paintings, The Giant (1907) shows the influence of the Symbolist painter Mikhail Vrubel, but Pevsner was also impressed by the Russian Byzantine tradition.

Antoine Pevsner Monde

Antoine Pevsner Vision spectrale

Antoine Pevsner Construction dans l'espace

Universal Flowering

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Universal Flowering (Mirovoi rastsvet)

Universal Flowering is the name given by Pavel Filonov to his system of analytical art. The system arose from cubo-futurist experiments and works that he undertook from 1913-1915. It is characterized by very dense, minutely facetted, and relatively flat surfaces created by working from the particular to the general, using the smallest of brushes and the sharpest of pencils. The images have both Cubism's multiple vantage points and Futurism's representation of a figure over time. A number of the paintings, while having a given orientation, are painted as though they could be oriented in a variety of ways. Filonov's philosophy was originally formalized in written form in 1915, which was revised and published as The Declaration of Universal Flowering in 1923 when Filonov was a professor at the (then) Petrograd Academy of Arts. Filonov's main theoretical work The Ideology of Analytical Art (Ideologia analiticheskogo iskusstva) was published in 1930.

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Neo-primitivism

Russian movement that took its name from Aleksandr Shevchenkos Neo-primitivizm (1913). This book describes a crude style of painting practised by members of the DONKEYS TAIL group. Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Shevchenko himself all adopted the style, which was based on the conventions of traditional Russian art forms such as the lubok, the icon and peasant arts and crafts. The term Neo-primitivism is now used to describe a general aspiration towards primitivism in the work of the wider Russian avant-garde during the period 191014. It embraces the work of such disparate painters as Chagall, David Burlyuk and Pavel Filonov, and poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh.

Russian artists associated with Neo-primitivism include: David Burlyuk, Marc Chagall, Pavel Filonov, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kasimir Malevich, Aleksandr Shevchenko.

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Aleksandr Shevchenko (1883-1948) Cubist Composition (Man with Guitar). 1915

_____________ Synchromism

Style of painting based on the theory that colour provides the basis for both form and content. It was conceived in Paris shortly before World War I by Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. It was Russells idea that paintings could be created based on sculptural forms interpreted two-dimensionally through a knowledge of colour properties. Synchromist paintings, stressing an emphasis on colour rhythms, were composed of abstract shapes, often concealing the submerged forms of figures, for example Synchromy in Blue (1916; New York, Whitney) by Macdonald-Wright. The two artists first attracted attention at the Neue Kunstsalon in Munich in June 1913. Their second exhibition of Synchromist painting was at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris from October to November 1913.

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Morgan Russell (1886-1953)

Morgan Russell Cosmic Synchromy

Morgan Russell Synchromy in Blue-Violet

Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973)

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Airplane Synchromy in Yellow-Orange

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Califronia Landscape

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Yin Synchromy No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Oriental Synchromy

Stanton MacDonald-Wright The Jade Flute No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Still Life wit Cyclamen and Fruit

_____________ London Group

English exhibiting society founded in November 1913. On its foundation it absorbed many members of the CAMDEN TOWN GROUP and also incorporated the more avant-garde artists influenced by Cubism and Futurism, some of whom afterwards joined the Vorticist movement. Among the founder-members were David Bomberg, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Harold Gilman (the groups first president until his death in 1919), Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore, Percy Wyndham Lewis, John Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. The group was organized in opposition to the conservatism of the Royal Academy and the stagnation of the formerly radical New English Art Club. Though, as can be judged from the names of its founders, it had no homogeneous style or aesthetic, it acted as a focal point for the more progressive elements in British art at that time.

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Harold Gilman Clarissa 1911

Harold Gilman (British, 1876-1919)

Harold Gilman Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord

Harold Gilman Edwardian Interior

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A Revolution in the Arts - All-Art.org